Landslide Susceptibilty Mapping of Rawalakot Using Remote Sensing and GIS

Abstract

Landslide susceptibility mapping is one of the most important researches in the landslide prone areas. The aim of the study was to produce landslide susceptibility maps based on GIS modeling and to conduct field surveys to get the local community’s point of view about the landslides. The area selected for this purpose was Rawalakot, located in district Poonch, Azad Kashmir. It is a mountainous region with catastrophic landslides occurrences that pose a serious threat to the infrastructure. Landslide susceptibility index maps were prepared utilizing different parameters namely topographic (slope, aspect, elevation, plan curvature, land use/land cover etc.); hydrological (distance from streams, SPI, TWI, precipitation etc.) and geological (lithology, distance from faults, distance from roads etc.) in GIS environment. All the parameter layers were assigned a certain weight and score using an analytical hierarchical process (AHP) based on heuristic approach and weighted overlay combination (WLC) to produce the final landslide susceptibility index map. AHP weights with 0.04 threshold consistency ratio (CR) values were used for identification of four different landslide susceptibility zones i.e. low, moderate, high and very high. Results showed that these zones covered 3 %, 33%, 45 % and 18% of the total area, respectively. The results showed that factors that contributed most in triggering the landslides were slope, lithology, rainfall, distance from thrusts, and land-cover, respectively. All these parameters combined showed that 63% of the total area of Rawalakot lies in the highly susceptible zone. Local community based field survey revealed that standard building codes should be adopted for construction of infrastructure in the area. The results of this study could be shared with national disaster management authority and other relevant agencies for designing mitigation strategies of landslides prone areas mapped in this study.